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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?

You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.

I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.

But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.

The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?

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That is exactly the point of the ruling, though... they are saying that AI summaries are NOT the same as search. If Google was just returning search results, and then users clicked on a website and read the content there, Google is not responsible for the content.

If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.

That makes sense to me?

why? tons of websites push misinformation intentionally. is there a truth requirement anywhere? i don’t get why this is a thing at all

What don’t you understand? Those websites that defame a company are liable for that defamation. In this case Google defamed a company in its AI summary and is this liable for that defamation.

So if I edit a Wikipedia article to share that consuming poison is safe and someone consumes poison after reading it… is Wikipedia legally liable?

No, because Wikimedia isn't responsible for the behavior of its editors.

> is Wikipedia legally liable?

Directly? Quite possibly. They'd then have to transfer that liability to you.

> is Wikipedia legally liable?

Probably not, because it's a similar situation where Wikipedia is accumulating user provided content. And people know Wikipedia can be freely edited.

You, however, might be liable. It's your content.

Not for defamation, nobody was defamed in that scenario. But Wikipedia has been sued for defamation at least once:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_v._Wi...

but if Wikipedia itself writes harmful content such as encouraging people to drink bleach, then wikipedia is liable. Google now generates its own content with AI, that defame others, so Google is liable.

> is there a truth requirement anywhere?

Yes, and it's called defamation when you don't follow it.

There is absolutely a truth requirement.

This is why you have to say "I think this person is a murderer" and not "This person is a murderer."

One is opinion. One is fact.

This isn't super hard.

And those tons of websites are liable for their misinformation. It's probably not worth suing some random blog because the author probably doesn't have money or lives in Russia. But Google has lots of money and a legal presence in almost every jurisdiction.

It's why people say "Donald Trump was held civilly liable for sexual assault in the E Jean Carroll case" instead of "Donald Trump raped E Jean Carroll"

Not precisely. The issue at hand isn't just that Google displayed the AI summary, but that they authored it, making them responsible for its contents. If the defamatory content had been in a snippet in the search results, they would've been fine, because that clearly has another author who can be held responsible. The AI summary has no other author than Google; therefore, they're responsible for what it says.

(What's the alternative, after all? Having no one responsible for what the AI summary says is clearly untenable.)

That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?

Google itself is more trustworthy from a normal person perspective as they use it a lot.

None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".

So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.

The title is misleading IMO. It should say "German ruling declares Google liable for libel in AI Overviews"

I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.

The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.

I think it's very clear that Google's AI overviews go far beyond just searching Google because they often incorrectly compile sources to come up with an incorrect answer. For example of this look at the comment I made in this thread

The question is whether Google is publishing false claims or relaying other people’s false claims. The court found it to be the former which makes sense to me.

I go to Google to search, but get spammed as if I wanted to talk to a chatbot (and a very poor quality chatbot at that).

This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.

Nothing is free. Google benefits off you when they show you search page. Either today (ads) or later

Playing the perception game wins you the perspective price.

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